Comment by jemmyw
8 months ago
Adding fluoride to water is a strange topic people get very worked up about. The levels of added fluoride are very low, it's been well studied at this point. Some places in the world need to filter out naturally occurring fluoride, which is one of the reasons that not everywhere adds it.
In NZ we appear to be moving in the opposite direction where central govt is now going to mandate the addition of fluoride where it was previously a local decision.
The levels of added fluoride are very low, it's been well studied at this point.
If you want to steel man the argument you should point out that the maximum allowed fluoride levels in US are quite a bit higher than in, for example the EU (on the order of 3 times higher), and that some recent studies have indicated some potential health risks for young children who consume a lot of water around the very top end of what the US allows.
Of course the correct response to this is to overhaul the recommendations and lower the maximum allowed levels, not to issue state wide bans.
Bans are more effective. There’s always some local hero in the water supply org who thinks he knows what’s best for everyone and modifies the fluoride amount to his liking. For example there was someone in Virginia a few years ago who lowered the fluoride to sensible levels and was fired for it.
set a maximum limit. make it a crime (probably is already) to purposely exceed those limits.
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> Adding fluoride to water is a strange topic people get very worked up about
Yes. It's weird, it seems to be given a special level of paranoia. And it's a longstanding one, the paranoid general in Dr Strangelove was obsessed with fluoridation.
Lots of substances have arguments over safe legal levels, with varying levels of scientific evidence. This seems to have a crusade, and I wonder who started it.
The recent NIH meta-study indicated there may be neurotoxic effects at concentrations within an order of magnitude of the recommended drinking water level (perhaps even at just 2x the recommendation), I wouldn't call that "very low".
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6923889/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003335062...
The best research I've seen on this, from NZ, suggests the neurocognitive effect in typical fluoridation programs is about as close to zero as you can get.
I admit I think people were stigmatized for raising concerns about it before, and find it sort of weird it was added without more safety data, but by the same token I think the most rigorous evidence suggests its pretty safe at the typical concentrations of most fluoridation programs.
I love the responses of people on the left on this issue. Can’t wait for the eventual group amnesia when the scientific consensus changes.
I actually consider myself "on the left," but find their turn to a sort of scientistic blind trust of anything remotely billed as "public health" during COVID to have been disastrous.
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would you agree with a multivitamin being dissolved and added to the water? why or why not?
If some areas had sufficient levels of that multivitamin in the water naturally and it produced a benefit, then it would make sense to add similar levels of that multivitamin to the water supplies that lacked it.
that would be great. maybe some electrolytes too.
While we're at it, I think my city could benefit from a subtle strawberry flavoring. Perhaps strawberry-banana would suit us best. The only question would be, aspartame or HFCS?
it would be nice if i could add it myself to my kitchen tap water, without wasting it when i shower